Murdoch admits 'cover-up'

April 26, 2012 07:19 pm | Updated November 17, 2021 12:16 am IST - London

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch with his wife Wendi Deng leave the High Court in London after giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Thursday.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch with his wife Wendi Deng leave the High Court in London after giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Thursday.

Rupert Murdoch on Thursday admitted there was a “cover-up” at the News of the World over the scale of phone hacking by its journalists and said he wished he had closed it much earlier.

But he denied any personal culpability claiming he and senior executives of his company News International were not told the full facts. “I do blame one or two people for that... someone took charge of a cover up we were victim to and I regret that,” said the 81-year-old media tycoon on the second day of his deposition before a judicial inquiry into media ethics in the wake of the hacking scandal.

'Permanent blot'

Describing what happened at NoW as a “permanent blot” on his career, Mr. Murdoch repeatedly apologised to the victims of the newspaper's tactics and to the “innocent” staff who lost their jobs when he finally closed it last summer. “I am guilty of not having paid enough attention to the News of the World , probably throughout all of the time that we've owned it. I was more interested in the excitement of building a new newspaper and doing other things... it was an omission by me,” he said admitting that he should have probed deeper when the scandal first erupted and the paper's Royal Editor Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007 for hacking the phones of the royal family.

At the time it was claimed that he was the lone “rogue” reporter and there were no other instances of hacking.

Mr. Murdoch said he should have had a “one-on-one” meeting with Goodman and tried to find out more when the latter claimed the practice was widespread. He said the penny really dropped after the revelation that the NoW had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a teenage schoolgirl who went missing and was found dead.

The Dowler story got “huge publicity” and he “panicked”. He “could feel the blast coming in the window, almost”, he said.

Downing Street, meanwhile, rejected calls for an inquiry into Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's role in passing crucial inside information to News International about the Murdochs' £8-billion controversial bid for BSkyB.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.